Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Sent in a request to Dell to fix Chris's laptop screen. Sent files to James at home. Uploaded changes to the electives schedule for Debrah. Uploaded changes to the senior interviews page for Joel. Lunch with Joel at Beijing on Irving: sweet and sour pork and a Diet Coke for him, mixed vegetables with shrimp for me. My fortune: Youth is a gift of nature, middle age is a work of art. His fortune: You are never selfish with your advice or help. To which Joel added, "...in bed with handcuffs and a sailor yelling anti-war slogans." The impending war against Iraq has everyone worried and jittery. Joel said on the bus to work he saw a man downtown dressed in a business suit yelling "NO WAR!" at the top of his lungs, total absence of control. During lunch, we talked about what we're doing differently because war seems likely, despite what we and many others would like. I told him Patrick decided he won't take Muni in the tunnel anymore. And I plan to carry bottled water and a flashlight everywhere I go. He wondered: why a flashlight? I told him, "You can't film it if there isn't light," and he burst out laughing. I have no video camera and no intentions of making a film, but the absurdity (or hope?) of glamour in the midst of suffering made him laugh, I think. I think I've found out the problem with getting Joel's new graphics card to work. The monitor has two different inputs: VGA female and DVI-I female. I have 6 different video cables. One uses a single ADC male to dual VGA female, two cables have a single ADC male to dual DVI-D female, one is a link cable DVI-D male single link to DVI-D male single link, another is a link cable DVI-I male to DVI-I male (which from the pinouts looks like dual link but I suspect is really single link because a search on the printing on the cable ("UNIXTAR E74020-C") found a page that said this cable was single link), and a last one is a link cable VGA male to VGA male. None of these in any combination worked—I'd get no signal at all. Dinner at home with Patrick: Caesar salad and leftovers. Over dinner we listened to CNN live radio feed over the Internet to President George W. Bush's announcement of the start of the war. The news disappointed us tremendously. Our worries and planned changes of behavior over the past couple of days have suddenly become a lot more real. Started getting a sore throat late tonight. It's ironic because I had already decided I would go in to work tomorrow despite a call from internationalanswer.org for people to walk out of their daily routine—jobs, school, smoking weed and watching TV on the couch—and gather in protest downtown.